Gear & Gadgets —

Android enthusiasts hack Honeycomb to run on Nook Color

The Nook Color has been hacked to run an experimental port of Android 3. …

The Android-based Nook Color has attracted an enthusiastic community of modders who extend the functionality of the $250 touchscreen e-book reader by installing custom firmware and third-party applications. After-market enhancements can transform the e-book reader into a modest tablet computing device.

The latest feat achieved by the Nook modding community is a working port of Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb. Android 3.0 introduces Google's new user interface for devices with a tablet form factor and also includes new APIs that are intended to simplify the development of Android applications for tablets.

The unofficial port of Honeycomb to the Nook is still at a relatively early stage of development, but it already has working support for hardware-accelerated rendering on the Nook hardware. This is a highly significant revelation because it demonstrates the potential suitability of Honeycomb for lower-end devices.

NVIDIA's dual-core Tegra 2 chipset is regarded as the reference hardware for Honeycomb. When it became apparent that Honeycomb was targeting dual-core hardware with high-end 3D graphics capabilities, concerns were raised about whether it would be able to run on more conventional devices. Google has repeatedly debunked the claim that Honeycomb will require a dual-core processor in order to function. The new Nook port shows unambiguously that Android 3.0 doesn't require bank-breaking specs.

Although the port is an impressive achievement, more work is needed before Android 3.0 will be practical for day-to-day use on the Nook. It's still missing some critical features, such as WiFi support. It's worth noting that Google hasn't even officially released the code for Android 3.0 yet—the modders are pulling the new version of the operating system out of the software development kit that Google recently made available as a preview.

It's likely that Android 3.0 on the Nook will get a big boost when Google does the official code drop. We expect that to take place in the next month or two, at some point after Motorola launches its Honeycomb-based Xoom tablet.